Not as weird as the two totally unrelated presidents whose last names were both Roosevelt, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, the two presidents named Grover Cleveland who were not just related, but actually the exact same person.

Donald Trump drinks twelve cans of diet Coke each day and has a call button on his desk to summon more Coke.

The two Presidents Roosevelt do raise* the question** as to how distantly related you can be to someone and still be considered unrelated. After all, at some level, every living thing has a common ancestor. Franklin Roosevelt is six generations separated from a common ancestor with Theodore Roosevelt. While they might be distantly related enough to be genetically indistinguishable from unrelated humans, the wealth of the family likely makes their political careers more correlated than actually unrelated people would be.

Further information here: Everybody is your 16th cousinThe short answer is that in the time period, where immigrant communities tended to group together by nationality, and travel was less frequent, being 6th cousins isn't particularly remarkable, as essentially everyone would be expected to be, at minimum, 9th cousins with someone from the same general background.

The least weird fact is that people can't ever shut up about Trump. (We ought to give that a name by the way, like a Godwin but stronger: as a conversation goes on, the chance of naming Trump or his deeds approaches 1 and from then on it can only go on about politics.)

Far weirder, though, is the fact that Randall made this comic. Either the story/reference/joke went straight over my head or it's just very bland.

And it is strange that a country that fought a war* to get away from hereditary rulership has had, among its 45 Presidents**, two father-son pairs, one grandfather-grandson pair, one pair of shirttail cousins, and a 5th pair with the same last name but no relation. (Adams, Bush, Harrison, Roosevelt, and Johnson, in order.) And it just missed adding husband-wife pair to the list.

* - in part

** - 45 presidents, but only 39 people elected to the office... 2 nonconsecutive presidencies were the same person, and 5 people took over for an elected president without being later re-elected themselves. One of those wasn't even elected vice-president.

The elephant is the party symbol of the Republicans. And we all know it was a circus. Then last month it was revealed that a Nellie Ohr had something to do with the Russian probe. Next: someone has to pack their trunks?

There's been some notable recent satirical playing around with the words"Poo Tin" here in the anglosphere. Some fictional (at least at first!) 'products' like cat-litter trays, but (along with "No Shit Sherlock!") you can find a de(re?)odouriser given this mocking version of his monicker.

(And "pootin'" is also/especially a word that some would use for having downwardly expelled flatus. As is to "trump".)

Mikeski wrote:And it is strange that a country that fought a war* to get away from hereditary rulership has had, among its 45 Presidents**, two father-son pairs, one grandfather-grandson pair, one pair of shirttail cousins, and a 5th pair with the same last name but no relation. (Adams, Bush, Harrison, Roosevelt, and Johnson, in order.) And it just missed adding husband-wife pair to the list.

David Cannadine wrote:Some commentators went even further [than Lincoln's Secretary of State], insisting that although America claimed to be a republic, because it had no hereditary sovereign, it was in reality a disguised monarchy - whereas Britain might claim to be a monarchy, because it had a royal head of state, but it was in fact a concealed republic, because the politicians rather than the sovereign were actually in charge. In the words of one late 19th Century American newspaper: "Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king."

GlassHouses wrote:As someone who occasionally glances at French newspapers, it amuses me to no end that the French spell the Russian president's last name "Poutine."

The reason for this is that, if it were spelled Putin, it would be pronounced like 'putain', which is french for whore. Calling him Poutine is actually the less offensive option.

It's weird to me that the French will misspell someone's name just because "otherwise it's not pronounced correctly". Someone I know had a French pen pal and they would write my acquaintance's name in a weird way. (Not because it would otherwise be offensive; just to maintain the correct pronunciation.) That reasoning has always blown my mind. Is it really that hard to remember the pronunciation of a non-French name?

GlassHouses wrote:As someone who occasionally glances at French newspapers, it amuses me to no end that the French spell the Russian president's last name "Poutine."

The reason for this is that, if it were spelled Putin, it would be pronounced like 'putain', which is french for whore. Calling him Poutine is actually the less offensive option.

It's weird to me that the French will misspell someone's name just because "otherwise it's not pronounced correctly". Someone I know had a French pen pal and they would write my acquaintance's name in a weird way. (Not because it would otherwise be offensive; just to maintain the correct pronunciation.) That reasoning has always blown my mind. Is it really that hard to remember the pronunciation of a non-French name?

Given that the correct spelling of the Russian president's last name is Пу́тин, I think I can cut the French some slack here. There is no such thing as a universally consistent transliteration scheme, unfortunately.

There’s also an amount of linguistic snobbery in refusing to use phonetic conventions from outside of the language being spoken. Remember, French is a language that has its own official institute for the preservation of linguistic purity, dedicated to the prevention of the adoption of foreign-isms.

ijuin wrote:There’s also an amount of linguistic snobbery in refusing to use phonetic conventions from outside of the language being spoken. Remember, French is a language that has its own official institute for the preservation of linguistic purity, dedicated to the prevention of the adoption of foreign-isms.

I wouldn't call it snobbery when a French-language publication writes Putin as Poutine. The Latin alphabet is supposed to be a phonetic writing system, and while no language has a perfect correspondence between letters and sounds, it is necessary to make an occasional effort to keep spelling and pronunciation in sync.

As has already been pointed out, writing Putin as Putin, in French, is just wrong. The French u sounds very different from the Russian у, and the best available transcription happens to be "ou." Likewise, the French ending -in sounds very different from the Russian -ин, and -ine is closer.

How can you call it arrogant to use a transcription that gives the best possible phonetic approximation of the original (not perfect, the differences between Russian and French phonotactics are too great for that), rather than copy the transliteration used in a completely different language?

In Dutch, Putin's name is rendered Poetin. No final -e here, because Dutch has no nasalized vowels to avoid, but the у is transcribed as "oe," because the Dutch u sounds like the French u, i.e. unlike the Russian у, and unlike the English u. Maybe the Dutch refuse to use the English transliteration because they, too, are snobbish about their language, but that would be an accusation you don't hear a lot.